I thought I was done with TSM. And just when you think you are out, they pull you back in. Only in this case I am being pulled back in by some feedback from a colleague on my previous column. I didnt want to relegate his input to a comment where it wouldn’t get adequate ...

I thought I would wrap up my thoughts on TSM, for now, by talking briefly about two things TSM users are typically concerned about: migrating TSM clients and getting off TSM. The first one of these is something we talked about just recently. And I think I covered off the easiest way to move to ...

Once you have decided that your traditional tape infrastructure is not serving your business needs for backup and recovery particularly well, and that your TSM infrastructure requires some updating, what’s next? As I discussed last time out, having the ability to “fix” TSM by dramatically improving the daily schedule, free up TSM server cycles, and ...

I spend a lot of time talking to people about Avamar. I think it is a great application that pretty radically reinvents backup architectures. It does so many things well, and has consistently been ahead of the curve in terms of delivering advanced backup technologies. For example, Avamar was one of the first to market ...

I have been spending a lot of time with TSM accounts lately, so I thought I would take the opportunity to discuss some of the gotchas and lessons learned from these environments, as they moved from a tape-centric backup environment to a disk based backup environment using EMC Data Domain technology.   The first and ...

Mainframe tape is a funny thing. Or at least it can look funny to a person that doesn’t work with mainframes. Funny because mainframe tape does a bunch of things. In the open systems world, life is simple by comparison. Tape does (or did!) basically one thing: backup. Yes, you could argue that it was ...

Over the last little while, we have become used to seeing discussions of data and storage for Big Data. As if Big Data possesses a unique set of challenges around the acquisition, management, replication, and protection of the data. And so it does. For now. Because after reviewing the latest set of statistics from the ...

Today EMC is announcing a new version of EMC Avamar software and hardware. With the latest release come a ton of new features, bigger, better, faster hardware, and support for integrating Avamar with Data Domain. So, without further preamble, let’s jump into what is new in Avamar v6.0: On the hardware side, the new release ...

EMC is hosting a webcast next week on the topic of simplifying long term retention of backups and archives. This webcast is available ondemand.  [Original airdate: Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 16:00 GMT.] Register now  For fast and reliable long-term retention, integrate EMC Data Domain Archiver into ...

Today EMC introduced the industry’s fastest deduplication storage systems. And they are fast. Big and fast. Impressively so, and even more impressively if you have been involved with backup systems for a while—in a “look how far we have come” sort of way.  But to focus on just the speed and scale would be to ...